THE ENLIGHENTMENT (1736 – 1776)

 

1. Read the description of the period and decide how the prevailing spirit of the epoch can be described.

 

Central to Enlightenment thought were the use and the celebration of reason, the power by which man understands the universe and improves his own condition. The goals of rational man were considered to be knowledge, freedom, and happiness.

The Enlightenment produced the first modern secularized theories of psychology and ethics. John Locke conceived of the human mind as being at birth a tabula rasa, a blank slate on which experience wrote freely and boldly, creating the individual character according to the individual experience of the world. Supposed innate qualities, such as goodness or original sin, had no reality.

In a darker vein, Thomas Hobbes portrayed man as moved solely by considerations of his own pleasure and pain. The notion of man as neither good nor bad but interested principally in survival and the maximization of his own pleasure led to radical political theories. Where the state had once been viewed as an earthly approximation of an eternal order, with the city of man modeled on the city of God, now it came to be seen as a mutually beneficial arrangement among men aimed at protecting the natural rights and self-interest of each.

The idea of society as a social contract, however, contrasted sharply with the realities of actual societies. Thus the Enlightenment became critical, reforming, and eventually revolutionary. Locke and Jeremy Bentham in England, and Thomas Jefferson in America all contributed to an evolving critique of the authoritarian state and to sketching the outline of a higher form of social organization, based on natural rights and functioning as a political democracy. Such powerful ideas found expression as reform in England and as revolution in France and America.

The Enlightenment expired as the victim of its own excesses. The more rarefied the religion of the deists became, the less it offered those who sought solace or salvation. The celebration of abstract reason provoked contrary spirits to begin exploring the world of sensation and emotion in the cultural movement known as Romanticism. The Reign of Terror that followed the French Revolution severely tested the belief that man could govern himself. The high optimism that marked much of Enlightenment thought, however, survived as one of the movement's most enduring legacies: the belief that human history is a record of general progress.

 

· TASK A

Define the connections between the following names: Locke, Hobbes, Jefferson, Revolution, Reform, and Romanticism.

2. Study the biographies of the writers of the period. Be prepared to summarize their activities.

Дальнейшее развитие литературы Просвещения. Сэмюэл Ричардсон – создатель семейно-бытового психологического романа.

 

Richardson, Samuel (1689-1761), English novelist, born in Derbyshire. He was apprenticed to a printer in his youth and later set up his own printing shop in London. Richardson became known as a gifted letter writer, and in 1739 he began to write a volume of model letters for the use of the country reader that appeared as Familiar Letters (1741). While engaged in writing the form letters he also wrote and published the celebrated novel Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (2 volumes, 1740), telling, in the form of letters, the story of a young maid-servant's defense of her honor. Clarissa; or the History of a Young Lady (7 volumes, 1747-1748), which explores and reexplores the same events from the points of view of several of the characters, is considered his best work. Like Pamela, it was praised for its lofty moral tone, sentimentality, and understanding of emotions and the feminine mind. His last important work was The History of Sir Charles Grandison (7 volumes, 1753-1754), in which he presented his ideal of a true Christian gentleman. All of Richardson's novels are in epistolary form (a series of letters)—a structure that he refined and developed. For this reason, Richardson is considered a founder of the English modern novel. Henry Fielding parodied Pamela in An apology for the life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (1741) and The Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his Friend, Mr. Abraham Adams (1742).

 

Генри Филдинг – основоположник социального романа. Теория романа Филдинга. «История Тома Джонса» как вершина творчества писателя.

Fielding, Henry (1707-1754), English novelist, playwright, and barrister, who, with his contemporary Samuel Richardson, established the English novel tradition. Fielding was born at Sharpham Park, Somerset, and educated at Eton College and in law at the Leiden University. From 1729 to 1737 he was a theatrical manager and playwright in London. Of his 25 plays, the most popular was the farce Tom Thumb (1730). In 1740 he was called to the bar; as justice of the peace for Westminster from 1748 and for Middlesex from 1749, he worked hard to reduce crime in London. Meanwhile his career as a novelist began. His first published novel, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams (1742), was intended as a parody of the sentimental moralism of the popular novel Pamela (1740), written by Samuel Richardson. Fielding had already parodied Pamela in his pseudonymous work, Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews. Fielding's talent for characterization and for depicting a lower-class milieu, however, make Joseph Andrews far more than mere parody; it is a great comedy in its own right. Miscellanies (3 volumes, 1743) contains a long mock-epic treatment of heroism, The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great, as well as miscellaneous poems, essays, and plays, including A Journey from This World to the Next. The latter is a lively account of a group of disparate spirits on their way to Elysium (from Greek mythology, a place of ideal happiness).

Two volumes of political journalism, The True Patriot (1745) and The Jacobite's Journal (1747), preceded publication of The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749). Tom Jones, regarded by critics as one of the great English novels, is in the picaresque tradition, involving the adventures and misadventures of a roguish hero. It tells in rich, realistic detail the many adventures that befall Tom, an engaging young libertine, in his efforts to gain his rightful inheritance. (It was made into a successful motion picture, Tom Jones, in 1962.) Amelia (1751), a study of justice and the penal system in England, is the most serious of Fielding's fiction and his last novel.

Fielding is highly regarded for his innovations in the development of the modern novel. Although he was not the first novelist, he was the first writer to break away from the epistolary method. Fielding devised a new structure and theory that laid the foundation for the works of Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and the Victorian domestic novelists.

 

Деятельность Сэмюэла Джонсона. Первый словарь английского литературного языка и его значение для развития литературы.

 

Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784), English writer and lexicographer, a major figure in 18th-century literature as an arbiter of taste, renowned for the force and balance of his prose style.

Johnson, usually referred to as Dr. Johnson by his contemporaries and later generations, was born in Lichfield on September 18, 1709, the son of a bookseller. He attended the local school, but his real education was informal, conducted primarily among his father's books as he read and studied the classics, which influenced his style greatly.

In 1728 Johnson entered Pembroke College at the University of Oxford. A brilliant but eccentric young man, he was plagued by a variety of ailments from which he suffered the rest of his life. He left in poverty, without taking a degree and having suffered the first of two emotional breakdowns. During this time of despondency his reading of devotional literature led him to a profound religious faith.

After his father died in 1731, Johnson tried teaching and later organized a school in Lichfield. His educational ventures were not successful, however, although one of his students, David Garrick, later famous as an actor, became a lifelong friend. At the age of 26 Johnson married Elizabeth Jarvis Porter, a widow about 20 years his senior, who brought a measure of calm and self-confidence to his life.

In 1737 Johnson, having given up teaching, went to London to try the literary life. Thus began a long period of hack writing for the Gentleman's Magazine. Johnson's long, sonorous poem The Vanity of Human Wishes, based on the tenth satire of the Latin poet Juvenal, appeared in 1749; generally considered Johnson's finest poem, it marked the beginning of a period of great activity. He founded his own periodical, The Rambler, in which he published, between 1750 and 1752, a considerable number of eloquent, insightful essays on literature, criticism, and moral theory.

Beginning in 1747, while busy with other kinds of writing and always burdened with poverty, Johnson was also at work on a major project—compiling a dictionary commissioned by a group of booksellers. After more than eight years in preparation, the Dictionary of the English Language appeared in 1755. This remarkable work contains about 40,000 entries elucidated by vivid, idiosyncratic, still-quoted definitions and by an extraordinary range of illustrative examples.

Despite anxieties about his productivity, Johnson published another periodical, The Idler, between 1758 and 1760; and in 1759, to pay for his mother's funeral, he hurriedly completed Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, a prose romance about a young man's search for a happy life.

“Dictionary Johnson” (as he has been called) was now a celebrity. In 1764 he and the eminent English portraitist Sir Joshua Reynolds founded the Literary Club; its membership included such luminaries as Garrick, the statesman Edmund Burke, the playwrights Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and a young Scottish lawyer, James Boswell. From their first meeting in 1763 Johnson and Boswell were drawn to each other; for the next 21 years Boswell minutely observed and recorded the conversation and activities of his hero. Boswell's monumental Life of Samuel Johnson, one of the greatest biographies ever written, was published in 1791.

Trinity College in Dublin awarded Johnson an honorary doctorate of civil law in 1765, the same year that he published his edition of Shakespeare with its acute commentary on the characters in the plays. Sometime after 1760 Johnson experienced a second mental breakdown. The great hospitality of his friend Hester Lynch Thrale brought him some peace, and her Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson (1786) provides valuable insights into the mind and heart of Johnson during this period of personal turmoil. In 1773, however, he was well enough to undertake and enjoy a trip with Boswell to Scotland and the Hebrides, a trip vividly recounted in his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775).

Johnson's last major work, The Lives of the English Poets, was begun in 1778, when he was nearly 70 years old, and completed—in ten volumes—in 1781. The work is a distinctive blend of biography and literary criticism. Johnson died three years later on December 13, 1784.

Nineteenth-century biographers fostered the image of Johnson as an awkward, unkempt eccentric, whose conversation was certainly lively and memorable, but whose literary influence was slight. A full-scale scholarly evaluation of Johnson's contributions as a writer began only in the mid-20th century. The psychological study Samuel Johnson (1944), by American critic Joseph Wood Krutch opened up new ways of thinking about the man and his work. The most comprehensive and penetrating scholarship has been that of Walter Jackson Bate, another American literary scholar, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Samuel Johnson (1977). In these studies Johnson emerges as a troubled but undaunted man, compassionate to the poor and oppressed, relentless in his quest for truth, a humanist par excellence. His writing, in defense of reason against the wiles of unchecked fancy and emotion, championed the values of artistic and moral order.

 

Разнообразие жанров позднего Просвещения. Сентиментализм в литературе. “Готический роман” как один из первых образцов массовой литературы.

 

Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768), English novelist and humorist, who wrote The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, one of the great 18th-century masterpieces of English fiction. Sterne was born on November 24, 1713, in Clonmel, Ireland. The son of an English army officer, he was educated at the University of Cambridge and was ordained a priest in the Church of England in 1738. He spent the next 21 years as a vicar in Yorkshire, preaching eccentric sermons, reading the 16th-century French satirist Francois Rabelais and old romances, and spending his time and attentions on women other than his wife.

In 1760 Sterne settled in London, where, despite suffering from tuberculosis, he lived a social, dissolute life. His Sermons of Mr. Yorick (1760-1769) was well received. The first two volumes of his major work, the droll, rambling, and slyly indecorous novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767), caused a literary sensation. They are important more for revealing the thoughts and feelings of the author than for describing external events. Tristram Shandy was a highly original and innovative work; it exploded the budding conventions of the novel and confounded the expectations of its readers. Sterne had unique ideas about perception, meaning, and time that made Tristram Shandy a precursor to the modern novel and stream of consciousness. Seven more volumes appeared between 1761 and 1767. Sterne also published Journal to Eliza (1767), written to Mrs. Eliza Draper, one of his many women friends. For health reasons, from 1762 to 1764 Sterne lived in Toulouse, France, with his wife, who was mentally ill, and their daughter. In 1765 he made a lengthy tour of France and Italy. A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768) records his appreciation of the social customs he encountered in France. When Sterne died in London on March 18, 1768, only two volumes of this work had appeared. Volumes of his letters were posthumously published in 1775.

Gray, Thomas (1716-1771), English poet, who was a forerunner of the romantic movement. He was born in London and educated at Eton College and the University of Cambridge. In 1750 he finished the poem for which he is best known, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” and sent it to his friend, the author Horace Walpole, at whose insistence it was published in 1751. Since that time the work has remained a favorite. Living at Cambridge, Gray wrote The Progress of Poesy (1754). In 1757 he refused an appointment as poet laureate. He became professor of history and modern languages at Cambridge in 1768. In the intervals of his scholastic duties he traveled widely throughout Britain in search of picturesque scenery and ancient monuments, recording his impressions in his Journal (1775).

Walpole, Horace, 4th Earl of Orford (1717-1797), English novelist and letter writer, born in London. After an education at Eton College and the University of Cambridge, he traveled in France and Italy with his friend the English poet Thomas Gray. Walpole entered Parliament in 1741 and remained a member until his retirement in 1768. His political career was limited to minor government posts, which he received primarily through the influence of his father, the prime minister Sir Robert Walpole. His estate became a showplace because of its pseudo-Gothic architecture, its fine library, and its collections of art and curios. He established a printing press there in 1757, and the fine books he produced influenced the development of English printing and bookmaking. Walpole dabbled in all the literary arts and made a real contribution to art history with his four-volume study Anecdotes of Painting in England (1762-1771). He is better known, however, for his novel The Castle of Otranto (1764); pervaded by elements of the supernatural, it is one of the first works of the genre known as the Gothic romance. Walpole's literary reputation also rests firmly on his correspondence, which provides witty and incisive commentaries on his time.

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Make sure you know what to say in connection with late Enlightenment being…

1. … a period of some political disillusionment in Europe.

2. … a period rich in literary innovation.

3. … a crucial step in the development of English.

4. … a period that can be called the Age of the Novel.

5. … a link between the Age of Reason and the Age of Romanticism.

DID YOU KNOW THAT? In 18th-century Europe there appeared the first modern works that were both devoid of literary value and designed solely to arouse sexual excitement. A small underground traffic in such works became the basis of a separate publishing and bookselling business in England. A classic of this period was the widely read Fanny Hill; or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749) by John Cleland. After serving as a consul at Smyrna and later as an agent of the British East India Company in Bombay, Cleland became a penniless wanderer who drifted from place to place and was apparently confined several times in English debtors' prisons. In such reduced circumstances, he wrote Fanny Hill (1748–49) for a fee of 20 guineas. An elegant, flowery work of pornography describing the activities of a London prostitute, this novel has enjoyed enormous popularity for more than two centuries as a classic of erotic literature. When originally published, it was immediately suppressed (an action later repeated many times), and Cleland was called before the Privy Council. He pleaded his extreme poverty and was not sentenced. Instead, Lord Granville, thinking him talented, secured him a yearly pension of £100, that he might put his gifts to better use.

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